It has been demonstrated that objects held in working memory can influence rapid oculomotor selection. This has been taken as evidence that perceptual salience can be modified by active working memory (e.g. Hollingworth, Matsukura & Luck, 2013). The goal of the present study was to examine whether these results could be better explained by feature-based bottom-up priming. In two experiments, participants were asked to saccade to a target line segment that was presented together with a to-be-ignored distractor. Both objects were given a task-irrelevant color that varied per trial. In a secondary task, a color had to be memorized, a color that either matched the target, the distractor, or none of the objects in the eye movement task. The memory task was completed either after the eye movement task (Experiment 1), or before (Experiment 2). The results showed that memory content biased oculomotor selection, an effect that was most pronounced for short-latency saccades. Crucially, this effect was similar in both experiments. This suggests that bottom-up feature priming rather than the active maintenance in VWM is the driving force behind early biases in oculomotor selection.